Monday

May
10, 1999

Love's Emblems

On this day in 1933, the Nazis held a huge BOOK BURNING near the
University of Berlin. Hitler had only been in power a few months, and
his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels staged the fire to rid libraries
of books he said struck "at the root of German thought." Near
midnight on May 10th he and hundreds of University of Berlin students
raided the library of books by authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas
Mann, Freud, and Einstein, threw them in a pile, and burned them.

It's the anniversary of the ASTOR PLACE RIOT,
in New York
City,
1849. It grew out of a feud between two actors, William Macready from
England, and Edwin Forrest, an American, who had a difference of opinion
about which one of them was the better actor. The feud simmered from
1836 to 1849 when, on the evening of May 10, a mob stormed the Astor
Place Opera House in New York, where Macready was appearing in Macbeth.
The militia was called in and in the end 23 people were killed in the
melee. The Museum of the City of New York has an exhibit on the Astor
Place Riot through October.

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